External iomega hard drive no longer recognized by disk management

[Guest]

Hello,
I am really stuck. I have an external Iomega Hard Drive which started to slow down in the last week. It's only a few months old. Today as I was trying to copy some files from it to another internal hard drive, it was snail pacing it. Long story short - it's now not being recognized on either my pc or laptop. I do see it in Device Manager, but not in Disk Management. I tried another usb cable - to no avail.

I just copied the contents of my internal hard drive to it last week so that I could reformat my internal hard drive. What can I do. I can't lose this data.

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hi Jolene,

Welcome to Tom's Hardware,

Well, safety first. Copy ALL you important data off this external HDD to another HDD if you can. When read and write times get longer and longer, it's usually a HDD failing.

There may be some things you can do if it is seen in Device Manager. Check there again, to see if it is listed with model number and size. Right click on it and see on the general tab if it says "this device is functioning normally".

You don't see any listing in the Disk Management snapin? Nothing in the lower graphical section?

If not, leave it connected, and on your main computer, start the command prompt "cmd"
There check on the status of the drives connected to your computer,
Type "DiskPart" rtn. You should see DiskPart>

next type "List Disk"
You should have columns of Disk#, Status, Size, Free, Dyn, Gpt
report what you have there, specifically a line relating to this ext disk. It may be listed as Disk 1, or Disk 2 etc depending on how many disks are connected.

If the Omega disk is listed,
next type "List Volume" and it will list all the Volumes on your system, including all volumes on this drive.
There are 8 column headings, report all the entries for any volumes seen from this Omega drive.

That will tell you if it is recognized by windows at all.

 

[luweasel]

Is there anything I can do if windows doesnt recognise it? My computer only lists my C:/ and my CD/ROM drives...
is it dead??

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hi there,

Well, go back and refresh our memory as to the problem you are having, the exact model nunber of the external HDD, if it has other connector choices besides the USB connection, and what has happened over the last 3 months. Were you ever able to back up the data from this external drive?
Also check the Device Manager to see if it is recognized there, and also Disk Management, to see it windows recognizes at all.